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The Emergence of Society, sequel
to John Pfeiffer's successful book, The Emergence of
Man, moves through the last hundred centuries before
recorded history began, and across every continent, to report
some of the greatest detective work of modern times -- the
search for clues to human beginnings, the mysteries of the
founding of society. It is a rich and exciting panorama
of how we became what we are. It is the biography of the
human creature.
Teams of young archeologists and anthropologists,
most of them in their early twenties and thirties, are searching
for the evidence on the constantly opening frontiers of
the human past. This book is the dramatic story of what
they have found and are still to find. It is the only up-to-date
and the first popular account of the rise of the Establishment,
of power structures and hierarchies; wealth, poverty, and
slavery; social class, the elites, and sexism; agriculture,
cities and states; art and music, propaganda and tradition;
kings and gods -- and how each of these served the others.
Pfeiffer offers convincing proof that many
recent polemics about human origins like The Territorial
Imperative and The Naked Ape are superficial
and simplistic. He demonstrates that practices like sexism
did not exist in "primitive" man but developed
with "civilization," and may now -- like social
class -- be anachronistic. On the basis of recent discoveries
he discards as myths the old view that culture began in
a Cradle of Civilization in the Near East or China and that
other peoples were savages. Digging in Southeast Asia has
uncovered art that predates the Chinese. Hawaii had an early
state resembling those in the Near East. The "barbaric"
Celts built cities before the touted Romans. Urban societies
emerged in the Americas independently of the Old World.
That the past is a guide to the present
becomes apparent as Pfeiffer describes the contest with
environment, the abandonment of cities, the effort to socialize
the male and to stop violence and war and oppression. Like
any true explorer he leaves the reader with further questions
the youth of the future must answer, questions about the
distribution of wealth and its effect on human survival,
about the mass enjoyment of art and its effect on skill,
about the probable decline of elites and the mystery of
what will succeed them. The knowledge of beginnings helps
to predict the future.
Written clearly and eloquently, with sophistication
and simplicity, this is a book that a layman and a scholar
can read with ease and a sense of common adventure.
John Pfeiffer is a popular writer who
has also been a professor of anthropology, a man who brilliantly
synthesizes complex ideas yet makes them readable, a scholar
who was a senior editor of Time magazine and president
of the National Association of Science Writers. His last
book was The Emergence of Man, a Literary Guild selection
that is also a classic text used in colleges across the
continent.
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